Ooh, goody, more Shadowrun rules. . .
No, that level of sarcasm is uncalled for. I can't claim to be the victim here. When I bought the Shadowrun Companion, I wanted more Shadowrun rules. And even though I'm currently going through a period in my life where reading a rule-packed book is mostly a form of endurance trial, I kind of like the fact that Shadowrun is the way it is. Like, now that I'm out of the thick of it, I can maintain a certain gratitude for the existence of the Electronic Counter-Counter-Measures system or the elaborate cyberware installation mechanics. I feel a jolt of terror when I contemplate using all the rules, but then I allow myself to succumb to the thanatotic temptation and I smile an evil smile. It's something I could do. I won't. I shouldn't. But I could.
The Shadowrun Companion actually ranks pretty high on the list of useable rules expansions, probably because it's a grab-bag of topics. We get a few new systems, but since they are all for different topics, we don't get subsystems or subsystems of subsystems. It's all very manageable. And the point-buy character creation may even be a simplification of the core's priority-based character creation (the new math could potentially be fiddlier and there's more scope for choice paralysis, but technically it's one fewer step and there's no single moment where you have to preemptively compromise your character-creation wishlist). Also, the new athletics rules are completely standard for any tactical rpg and should probably have been in the core.
The only system that your players are guaranteed to despise is the State of the Art (SOTA) rules. Basically, it's trying to model the relentless march of technological progress and the related obsolescence of older technology, but it does so in a very "adversarial GM" fashion. Every so often (the book suggests somewhere in-between the two extremes of "after every adventure" and "once per in-game year") you roll on a chart to determine which category of tech has advanced the most and then the characters must spend some of their hard-earned cash as a kind of tax to keep up with the State of the Art. If they don't pay the fee, any gear they have in the affected category is reduced in rating, and they might even have to reduce their characters' related skill ratings.
And I don't know. This is like a one-two punch of things that are guaranteed to irritate me as a player. I'm potentially losing things I spent experience points on and I'm losing them to a single roll on a random chart, without any opportunity to mitigate or prevent it (aside from spending money, I guess). I'm emotionally prepared to risk my character's life in combat, to spend expendable resources like ammo or nuyen, and to even lose permanent equipment (if a dragon is picking up my car in its talons and dropping it on my head, that's not an event I relish, but it's a memorable story). But "your gun does less damage because someone in a lab somewhere invented a better gun" would just make me grumpy.
A better way to do it would be to have the SOTA give your NPC opposition higher ratings, forcing you to get new equipment to keep up. Your gun doesn't lose damage, but rather Lone Star is wearing stronger armor. Although, I can see why they didn't go that route. It would lead, inevitably to an arms race where numbers keep getting higher without changing the overall balance of power. You'd get to a point where you're wielding 20-power handguns against rating-19 body armor and it would start to feel absurd.
But then, that absurdity is exactly the sort of thing the system is meant to model, so is it really that big a deal? Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe you could handle it with something like a SOTA pool. Like the characters' karma or combat pools it would allow you to add dice to various tasks, but it can only be replenished by spending money on equipment upgrades and supplemental training. That way, it's a bonus for making a special effort to keep ahead of the curve, and the only penalty for falling behind is the lack of a reward. You wouldn't even need to have the targeted SOTA advances, because players would define the march of technology through the specific rolls they chose to spend their SOTA pool on.
Although, I would be remiss if I didn't "on the other hand" this. It's perfectly possible to reframe the SOTA rules so that, instead of representing the march of progress, they are actually a form of cyberpunk commentary on capitalism - they represent planned obsolescence, lack of right-to-repair, and encroaching enshitification. Like, "my gun works worse because someone invented a better gun" is an aggravating bit of game design, but "my gun works worse because the manufacturer forced a firmware update to disable certain features in order to sell me a new, nigh-identical gun" is . . . still aggravating, but at least it's satirically aggravating.
It doesn't come up often, since I stopped blogging about video games, but I absolutely adore the survival-crafting genre and sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have an urban survival-crafting game based on cyberpunk themes that was absolutely brutal about capitalist rent-seeking, forcing you to marshal all of your skills just to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. My current thinking is that such a game would be immensely depressing if it was good, and immensely offensive if it was bad ("I call it 'Homelessness Simulator'"). And neither of those things is particularly good for a tabletop roleplaying game, so maybe it would just be for the best to not use the SOTA rules at all.
The Shadowrun Companion is also Shadowrun's answer to a gamemaster's guide. It has advice on dealing with problem players. There are instructions for structuring adventures. Theme is briefly addressed. It's all a little basic, but fine. Definitely contributes to the vibe that this book is mostly 130 pages that got cut from the core, but that's not such a bad thing to be. Not everything can be Mage 20th Anniversary Edition (nor should it, yikes!).
Overall . . . I am content. At peace, even. There are parts I could object to. Sometimes it leans a bit too much into the adverarial-gm mode. If you play a ghoul, you have to make a check to survive character creation. Elves are inexplicably expensive in terms of character points. It suggests that people with albinism and the Irish are inherently magical. On a list of questions meant to help you flesh out your character's background, it asks "Does your character have an ethnic background?" ("Nope. I have no ethnicity whatsoever. I am a meat popsicle.") But in general, I feel like this book brings value to the game.
Ukss Contribution: Shapeshifters are animals that turn into humans, not humans that turn into animals. I think this is a concept worth exploring.
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